Nuclear Rock

By Richard Martin/McArthur River

Eight hundred miles north of Montana, in upper Saskatchewan, sprawls a land of vast evergreen forests laced with lakes and streams, windblown sand ridges--and the world's richest deposits of uranium. From this Canadian wilderness, centered on the Athabasca Basin, fully a quarter of the world's annual supply of uranium is unearthed, most of it from a single mine called McArthur River. In a world increasingly concerned about the flow and price of oil from the Middle East, demand for the mine's controversial product is quietly rising.

McArthur River isn't much to look at from above ground--just a cluster of green, corrugated-metal buildings, a company lodge and an airstrip--but the mine is an industrial marvel. The rocks underground average 21% pure uranium, with pockets as concentrated as 80%, far richer than the typical 1% deposits at other mines. The ore at McArthur River is the richest in the world and is far too radioactive to handle conventionally; the miners extract it by remote control, using giant boring machines and scoop trams instead of pickaxes and shovels.

Since uranium was discovered at McArthur River in 1988, its corporate owner, Cameco, based in Saskatoon, Sask., has spent $277 million to develop it. Considering that the price of uranium has languished below the cost of production for most of the intervening years, Cameco's investment might seem like a fool's wager--until you look at what is happening in the battered market for U3O8, the raw uranium that's refined and enriched for use in nuclear reactors.

That market has enjoyed a little-noticed recovery over the past two years, as the price of uranium has crept back to more than $10 a lb. from its all-time, inflation-adjusted low of $7.10 at the end of 2000. Demand for uranium has risen steadily over the past decade, as stockpiles have dwindled and nuclear-power plants have increased their output. The U.S. nuclear-power industry generated a record 778 billion kW-h in 2002. That year marked the third consecutive all-time annual high, and experts estimate that 2003 will continue the streak.

Even as the debate over long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel raged during the 1990s, U.S. uranium consumption rose about 35% over the decade, to about 55 million lbs. in 2001. That makes Cameco's bet on McArthur River--and the firm's nearby mine, Cigar Lake, which could begin production around mid-decade--look a lot less foolish.

On a recent winter day, more than 2,000 ft. below the surface of the McArthur River mine, Dale Powder operated a scoop tram from a niche in the rock wall 100 ft. or so from the vehicle. He wore a hard hat and rubber boots, a radiation detector and a shoulder harness with a pair of joysticks that he manipulated through his heavy work gloves. The scoop tram looked like a dump truck with the cab lopped off. On solid-rubber tires 5 ft. high, it carried freshly mined ore in soccer-ball-size chunks to the "grizzly," the big grated dumping shaft, where the rocks begin their journey to the mill.

Powder is from Uranium City, 186 miles northwest of the mine, and near the end of his day shift, he was one of only two dozen or so miners at work underground at McArthur River. Where Powder works, it's as dry as a bone, but a few hundred feet away, in a neighboring tunnel, a perpetual fine rain falls. The porous sandstone that encases the mine's ore zone is saturated, even in winter, with water melting from the frozen surface. To keep the water from pouring into the mining shafts, Cameco's engineers have pulled off a remarkable feat: using one of the world's largest refrigeration plants, they have literally frozen the ground immediately surrounding the mine. Within the ice curtain, the walls and floors stay dry.

The freeze plant is only one of the technological innovations at McArthur River. The primary one is the method of production: known as "raisebore" mining, it has been commonly used to dig vertical elevator or ventilation shafts for close to 20 years. But before McArthur River came online in 1999, it had never been used to mine ore.

Here's how it works: McArthur River uses two horizontal floors, above and below the uranium-ore zone. One floor is 1,740 ft. underground and the other is at 2,100 ft., where Powder was stationed on the day of our visit. To start mining a new section of ore, a drill is used to dig a 15-in. pilot hole from the upper level to the lower one. Once the drill bit punches through the ceiling of the lower horizontal shaft, the drill is removed and a 10-ton, 10-ft.-wide reamer with tungsten-carbide teeth is attached. At the upper level, a raisebore machine pulls the rotating reamer slowly upward, carving out a much bigger hole. As the reamer climbs, ore tumbles down the shaft to the lower level, where the scoop tram waits. Once its bucket is full, an operator maneuvers the tram to a scanning station, where the purity of the load is analyzed, and then to the grizzly, where the ore is dumped.

There, far underground, rock-breaking machines crumble and grind the ore and mix it with water to form a soupy slurry, which is piped to surface containers to await transport to the Cameco refining mill at Key Lake, about 50 miles away. This underground processing plant is McArthur River's third major innovation. "What we've done," says Doug Beattie, the mine's chief engineer, "is essentially bring the front end of the mill down to the mine."

The wealth of energy these innovations produce is startling. One tramload at 60% U3O8 is worth about $134,000. A single hole produces something like $150 million worth of uranium in the 10 days or so it takes to bore it. By mining just 140 tons of ore a day (a thimbleful compared with big copper-or iron-ore mines), McArthur River produces more than 18 million lbs. of uranium a year. That's 20% of the world's annual production, enough to run 40 standard 1,000-MW reactors for a year. That much uranium can satisfy fully 2% of the world's electricity demand--as much as would be provided by 140 million tons of coal (twice Canada's annual production) or 450 million bbl. of oil (more than twice Qatar's annual production). Cameco expects to take 585 million lbs. of uranium out of McArthur River during the next 25 years or so--not counting a second ore zone, not yet fully delineated, a few hundred feet west of the current mine. And that still won't be enough to meet the world's growing hunger for uranium.

Pick up a chunk of uranium ore (a low-yield variety, please, and don't hold it for long), and you will be surprised by its weight. Uranium is denser than lead. McArthur River ore is a glossy black that gleams like marble. It's easy to imagine the radioactive energy stored in this rock. Whatever your environmental stance, at McArthur River you can sense the elemental power of uranium, a clean-burning source of seemingly limitless electricity. And you can understand former Cameco CEO Bernard Michel's assessment: "The world is seeing a fresh start for nuclear power."

Michel, 65, a Frenchman who stepped down as CEO in January and was succeeded by American Gerald Grandey, 56, spent his career turning Cameco from a Canada-focused mining company into a worldwide energy conglomerate. Cameco's goal is to become the ExxonMobil of uranium: a vertically integrated multinational involved in every stage of the fuel cycle, from extracting raw ore to fuel enrichment to delivering fuel rods. The company is a middleman in the U.S.-Russian program to import and reprocess uranium from decommissioned Soviet-era warheads, for use in reactors. With its 15% stake in the Bruce Power nuclear-power plant on Lake Huron in Ontario, the company is also an electricity generator. McArthur River lies at the heart of a nuclear empire that Cameco says will soon stretch from Saskatchewan to Central Asia to Australia. Cameco's stock, which has been climbing since early 2000, hit a one-year low of $16 a share last September, amid uncertainties about the uranium market. But as war with Iraq has grown more likely, and McArthur River production has reached capacity, investors have pushed the stock back up to almost $24 a share.

Michel's bullishness is spreading through the industry. Even with 12 million lbs. of U3O8 coming out of Russia each year, there is talk of a shortfall after 2010. While few people expect a new reactor to be built in the U.S. in the next decade, the Browns Ferry reactor in Alabama, idle since 1985, might be restarted in the next few years. Though Germany and Sweden have announced plans to phase out their 30 nuclear-power plants, Finland and Russia are planning four new reactors. In much of the developing world, a nuclear plant is the only viable alternative to a coal-fired plant. China is moving forward with an aggressive nuclear program, and India has announced plans for eight new reactors by 2008. The Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry association, forecasts that worldwide uranium demand could reach, optimistically, 250 million lbs. a year by 2020--far beyond the predicted supplies.

Even if the opening of new nuclear plants should falter, uranium could still become a scarce commodity. According to Julian Steyn, a uranium expert at Energy Resources International, a Washington consulting firm, if world demand remains flat at about 170 million lbs. a year over the next 20 years, uranium supplies will fall below that level sometime around 2013. That's why Michel calls uranium's current low price "unsustainable." And it's why, like it or not, uranium is going to play a growing role in the world's power supply. At a rate of 140 tons a day, the energy future is being unearthed at McArthur River.